Silas Dillon of Cary County

by Clifford Schrage

  I spent a lot of hours alone in the crib. My diaper was changed often enough to avoid detrimental cases of diaper rash. I did get a sense of being cherished often enough to survive, though. I felt a bit treasured when I was held by Mommy Sophia (Mrs. Madden) as she fed me with the formula bottle. She’d hold me, rock me a little as she hunkered her large, loose, turnip shaped body on the couch to watch the succession of sitcoms, drifting lost in other worlds of episodes, smoking menthol cigarettes, coughing, hacking, chewing sandwiches, often scolding Joseph, another ward of Cary County, their four-year-old foster child. “Joseph, stop that! Joseph, get down here! Joseph, don’t touch that! Joseph, eat your lunch! Joseph, be quiet! Joseph, get off that! Joseph, watch out for the baby! Joseph, not now! Joseph, what’s wrong with you!” It was almost poetic, almost comic.

  I was placed on the floor in a little reclining seat. I’d sleep long naps or gaze around, making sounds with my mouth and involuntary jerks with my limbs. Sometimes I was left in a room this way, alone with Joseph, at Joseph’s mercy, for minutes at a time. Joseph would pull at my arms, sit on me, twist my nose, press toys against, drop them and slam them on me, play with me like I were a toy or like a pet, make me laugh, cause me pain, frighten me, and make me scream. I still have a dent-like scar on my skull from Joseph. Joseph didn’t know better. There was something raging within him too, a hunger for warmth that he couldn’t control.

  At this juncture in Mommy Sophia’s life of employment, her options were either these doldrums of around the clock childcare, or back to the horror of working around the corner at the drycleaners or the supermarket as a cashier or some other place like these on the boulevard. But she couldn’t punch out at the time clock and call it a day with me and Joseph. We brought in less money than a job, but “caring” for us was easier.

  Once on a weekday afternoon of one of Earl’s jobless weeks, while Earl sat in his recliner drinking beer from a can, as I sat placidly in my reclining seat on the couch, as Joseph played with blocks on the floor, and Sophia sat beside me watching one of those vulgar weekday talk shows, the two of them conversed, which didn’t happen too often.

  “Soon’s the ballgame starts I’m turnin’ this bull off!”

  She ignored him, her attention charmed by the television.

  “Hear me?”

  “What?” She didn’t look at him.

  “The ballgame’s comin’ on. I’m turnin’ this bull off!” His voice raised. Joseph glanced at the screen, but immediately returned his attention to his tower of blocks.

  She made no reply.

  “I can’t believe people get on television like this with all their horse hockey!” He sipped his beer, slid a fresh cigar out of his top pocket, peeled off the cellophane, inserted it into his mouth, tucked it deeply into his jaw, struck a match, and puffed.

  “Look Mommy. Look Mommy!” Joseph wanted Mommy Sophia to see his proud tower. She wouldn’t look as the television screen seemed to absorb her.

  “Look Mommy. Look at my tower! Look at what I made!”

  “Okay. Okay. Good Joseph. Good!”

  The female talk show host engaged a studio audience with their comments and questions—bracketed by her directives—to a married couple on stage who were on the threshold of divorce, who had two small children, who vehemently argued with each other over each of their attachments to their parents and each of their parents’ involvement in their personal and family affairs. The combative, sarcastic, bitter tones—somewhat fake for effect—continued in time slices between commercial breaks, regressing, deteriorating, producing nothing salubrious whatsoever except to mesmerize, entertain, and enslave idle people like Sophia in their living rooms. At one climactic heated moment, the enraged wife vaulted to her feet shouting and pointing at her husband, shoving him once as he snickered, exacerbating her. Part of the audience laughed, part cheered. If this was real, then their marriage was ruined.

  “This is droppings!” Earl commented again, but he kept watching, keeping the channel, holding the remote, puffing. “You always watch this horse hockey?”

  She ignored him.

  After a little while I began to fuss, hungry and crying.

  “What the heck’s he want now?”

  “I don’t know. I just fed him.” Sophia remained fixed on television.

  I hadn’t drunk from my bottle for three hours.

  “Give him his pacifier!”

  “You give it to him,” she replied. “I don’t know where it is. Why don’t you get up for once! I just sat down!”

  The pacifier was hidden underneath me.

  Sophia had been seated on that misshapen couch for twenty minutes. “I’m not gettin’ up. You get up for a change!” Her halting voice and jolting body threatened, as though she’d physically conquer her small framed husband.

  He rose, scowled down at her with a wolfish glance, grimacing as though he smelled something rotten. She visually seemed to melt, flattening slightly from this higher perspective, making her width apparently wider, making her appear—in his semi-intoxication—in her immense brown house dress, immersed in the couch’s motley brownness, becoming part of the couch as her slouching, fluid wideness sank it.

  Earl entered the kitchen but couldn’t find a pacifier; so he took a half-filled bottle from the counter, marched back, and handed it to Mommy Sophia. My eyes brightened, happy to see this milk. Earl swallowed another long sip of beer and then let out a tremendous belch. She stuck the bottle in my mouth and situated a small blanket so that the bottle would prop up and she wouldn’t have to hold it for me.

  Once I finished, my stomach hurt, so I started to fuss again, and more so. I cried, and I cried loud. After about five minutes of this, the Yankee game came on. Earl raised the volume so he could hear the commentator over this howling of mine. More minutes advanced, and now I was screaming in panic. I needed to be burped, I needed to release the gas in my belly, but no one would pick me up and do it. My face grew red.

  “Shut up kid!” Earl growled.

  I kept screaming. A prolonged minute passed.

  Earl now stood, leaned, putting his glassy-eyed, weathered, unshaven face almost against mine, shouting, “I said shut up, kid!”

  This only made me cry louder, harder, more afraid.

  Joseph stopped his block piling to look. He looked scared, afraid he’d be yelled at next; but then he yelled at me, mimicking Earl virtually comically.

  Earl turned to Sophia, who finally moved to pick me up. “Can’t you do anything with this kid? His voice is goin’ right through me!”

  “He’s just a baby! What the devil’s the matter with you?”

  “Put him in his crib or something.”

  She patted my back a few times, but not enough to help. She walked to the stairway and heaved her enormity upward, ascending slowly. Each stair creaked. The banister tottered, rocked.

  Upstairs she plunked me into my crib, wound up my whirling mobile of airplanes, and closed the door, muting my screams which continued another ten minutes, until relief finally came to my stomach, without assistance, naturally bursting in burps like Earl’s. Awhile later I fell to sleep as tears dried on my face.

  I was at the mercy of my caretakers. They never played with me, never smiled at me. They plainly neglected my life. I wasn’t a full person. Within me remained an uneasy, insecure, unsafe feeling. Sometimes it felt thicker than at others. It sat in an instinctual way, like a squatting frog, as in a swamp, deep in the recesses of my senses. It hurt like pain. I cried and hated waking from sleep. My stomach and the muscles around my ribs sometimes ached from so much crying. Sometimes I felt like I’d completely shut down. Fear, grasping me from the deep cryptic structure of my existence, became a gnawing, cranky ache--a spasm of agony and a weighty vacancy of serenity that seemed to have an ever-present personality. It was an emptiness with substance. I wish I’d known words then.

  The acrid, slouching Maddens simply didn’t sense that I had feeling or significance, and their callous ignor
ance and negligence damaged me. They didn’t know. I couldn’t communicate, so they couldn’t infer. I wanted them to love me. I couldn’t hate them for not loving me. I didn’t know how to hate. I longed to respond to tenderness. To the Maddens, eating, sleeping, keeping warm, dry, and under a fever was all a baby needed. But I craved more. I lived so fiercely alone, but I couldn’t tell them.

  They didn’t tickle, cuddle, or adore me. I was like a pet they didn’t like very much. They never talked to me, unless Sandra Jackson my case worker was there for a visit. Then they pretended. Each month she’d come to check on me and the Maddens. She had thirty other cases to keep up with. The time and effort that the social workers from the county agency New Blossom put into their cases were essentially left up to them. They could accomplish the meager minimum with the lives of each of their cases—paperwork, showing up in court, making their minimal number of visitations. They could pretend for their superiors; or they could invest an extra mile of exertion, time, interest, and work to make changes. Fewer social workers could find room to do this.

  The Maddens didn’t directly hit me or hurt me, except for two times.

  When I was fed, sometimes I spat out, spraying, making noises with my tongue fluttering and lips vibrating, like babies do. Joseph would laugh. I would laugh. Mommy Sophia prevented that in different ways. But once when I was eleven months old, being fed mashed carrots from a jar at the high chair, Joseph came over, wanting to play and laugh, and stuck his tongue out, making that sound, prompting me to imitate.

  It was winter, December, and the weather had been nasty and icy a few days. I had a cold and didn’t sleep well that night, waking, crying repeatedly, waking everyone else as well. We were all cooped up. Mommy Sophia was in a bad mood that afternoon.

  “Joseph, stop it!” she shouted. With a mouthful, I let loose, mimicking Joseph. A thick shower of mashed carrots ejected with force, speckling Mommy Sophia. She thrust her huge torso quickly backward, dropping the jar, then spoon, quickly sliding her chair a foot backward. I spontaneously burst with ecstatic laughter at her sudden recoil, thinking maybe she were playing. I wasn’t sure though. Orange dappled her face, hair, glasses, blouse, and she simply stared in a momentary pause. Joseph laughed, and for some reason she seemed to descend into a chagrin, a shock, then an infuriation. Her expression collapsed, sinking into a fiend’s. She cursed—a shout—with her face an inch from Joseph’s. Terror swarmed the kitchen. He ran, and then I could hear his crying from the other room. She wouldn’t strike him because New Blossom didn’t permit hitting, or any spanking, and he was old enough to tattle. She stomped to the sink, turned the water on, saturating a dish towel, ringing it, wiping her face, shoulders, hair, removing glasses, cursing, washing away orange carrot.

  I watched her, startled. I’d been happily opening my mouth spoonful after spoonful, distracted in playing with a toy, banging it on the plastic tray; but now I was afraid, motionless. My face froze, and I began to scream. My loud bellows, red face, tears, and carrots in and over my mouth incensed her further. She saturated the towel again, and with all of its watery weight she threw it at me with enraged force. It slapped me in the face with a soggy thud, smothering me, wrapping me. My neck and tiny head dashed back, banging the back of the chair. She washed my face violently. I suffocated, drowned, choked, was silenced, screaming inside, hearing her gnashing curses and words. Soaked, I finally caught my breath and mustered up a scream. She wrung the towel out over my head, her corpulent face wiggling, contorted with a furious grimace. Again I choked, drenched, silenced in a half-pint of water. She slapped me once more with this weapon, jolting my head to the side.

  Once at fourteen months old, having one of my bad nights, my stomach ached with piercing cramps. I couldn’t stop crying and screaming, pleading for mercy as I stood in my crib in darkness behind the closed door where I could hear the television muttering and Earl Madden murmuring far downstairs. Then I heard Earl’s stomps ascending, my door opening, Earl’s shouting through drunkenness and darkness, “Lay down and go to sleep! Hear me? Hear me? Lay down!”

  I gaped at him with tear glazed face, squinting from the hallway’s sudden lighted brightness, in terror. Earl slammed the door, sealing me back into the darkness where he remained silent for a minute. Two minutes. Again I began my screams, terrorized. The stomach pain ruled me. Darkness enclosed me in fear, confusion, and dread.

  After another fifteen minutes Earl Madden’s stomping murmurs ascended toward me a second time. The door whirled open. I could see his frothing face in the glaring hundred-watt hall light. I caught my breath from bellowing, feeling the hopeful pause of life and relief, thinking maybe I’d be rescued by someone. I saw that it was Earl. I felt fear. He moved toward me, reaching, abruptly buckling my head with his palms pressed against my temples, lifting me in this way—by my head—yanking my face rashly up to his so that my timorous eyes were fixed into his burning sockets, so that my delicate running nose grazed against his beer laden breath. Earl banged my slight knees and feet against the crib bars. “Lay down and go to sleep! Are you gonna lay down and go to sleep! Ha? Ha? Ha kid?” Partially dangling, partially leaning against the rail, My frail weight suspended, hung from Earl’s callous hands, from my own head, by my flimsy neck. Earl tossed me back into the crib, flinging my frame against the bars on the opposite side, bouncing my slight weight onto my twisted foot and ankle on the stiff mattress, whacking my head on the rails.

  Again Earl slammed my essence back into the darkness with the loud door, and he descended, stomping. Clearly, he wanted me to be quiet and go to sleep, but it certainly wasn’t clear to me then. I whimpered, sobbed myself to sleep, still locked in an intense stomach pain. Yes, I was at the mercy of these, my foster parents.

  In the warm months, I spent a lot of time outside, playing in a playpen in the shade of a wild cherry tree in the tiny yard that spread only twelve times broader than the playpen. I managed to remain content unaccompanied, sometimes for hours, until I became hungry, agitated by a mosquito, or frightened by the neighbor’s barking Rottweiler. Sometimes Joseph played out there with me when Mommy Sophia was in the kitchen keeping us in her sight. There were times, in those balmy blue afternoons, Joseph would wander off. He would make me laugh and sometimes keep me interested in toys, his antics, little things in the yard. These times were my best at the Maddens’, amusing diversions which quietly brought ease to my distress.

  Like other babies, I loved the routines in life, like the morning cartoons. I felt a faint security in routine. The familiarity of my setting made me feel immune, ironically safe. The unfamiliar made me feel anxiety. With all my other struggles, a predictable course of simple daily affairs brought me reassurance, shielding me from fears. I needed the conditioning, the expectation, the regularity, the repetitions, no matter how oblivious I was to my misery. Ruptures in the routine, rearrangements, unexpected, clangorous surprises brought me dread and quiet panic.

  Fridays were mountainous days. Disruption came on Fridays. That’s when Sophia took me for my weekly noon visit with my birth mother Mommy Maureen at the agency.

  We crossed the bridge into Brooklyn, withstood traffic, arrived downtown where Mommy Sophia left me and Joseph for two hours in the eight story New Blossom Children’s Services office with our birth mothers. (Why the main offices were in the heart of Brooklyn rather than on Cary Island was because the city courts were there, and family court is an active place for the agency’s lawyers and social workers involved in foster cases like mine.) Anyhow, Mommy Sophia loved this two-hour hiatus. She got a break for two hours. Whenever Mommy Maureen didn’t show up though—which happened now and then—Mommy Sophia grew furious. She had to spend an hour one way in traffic, another hour to get home, and didn’t get her break. She was stuck with me in Brooklyn for two hours until Joseph’s visit was finished. She was rough with me then, impatient, jamming me into the stroller, yanking me out, changing me violently—everything was done brutally. She took out her anger for Maureen on m
e.

  Maureen Dillon was a stranger to me. As soon as I became nine months old I had that common sense of abandonment each week when I was handed to her for two hours. As there was no attachment, she was just an intruder, causing an attachment disorder, and she couldn’t understand this. I was placed into her shaky hands. She endured my crying and those visits, but she was also angered by my snubbing her.

  She loved the idea of getting healthy and keeping me. She hardly spoke, barely smiled, strove to force herself to get out of her enslavement to despair, out of her physical prison of addictions, out of herself, for me, or really for herself to keep me. I was her link to normality and sanity. Custody was an emblem, a symbolic badge to the world and herself of wellness and competence. Custody of my life was a manifest victory to her self-respect. Mommy Maureen’s custody of her baby was for herself; it was not so much for me. She craved that applause.

  She didn’t know how to love her son, but she wanted to know and pretended to know. She knew how to give birth, but couldn’t nurture. Her awkwardness at even holding me was evident even to me. I cried for half an hour sometimes. The consoling pacifier in my mouth as all that could tranquilize me.

  Maureen was in a drug and alcohol program appointed by the agency. She had to attend, cooperate, extricate herself from her addictions, and maintain residence before a judge would consider granting her custody. She had to stay in the care of a psychiatrist. She had to show up for weekly visits, and she needed favorable weekly reports from Sandra Jackson.

  Once when I was fifteen months old, after a visit with Mommy Maureen, in my exhaustion I fell asleep on the way home in my car seat. This I always did, but I usually woke up either before they returned home or once the car stopped in the driveway and the engine was turned off. But I kept sleeping this one time because I was extremely tired. So Mommy Sophia let me sleep in the car. It was about three o’clock, sunny, early April. The forsythias were beginning to bloom, the grass beginning greening. The sycamores extended their great bare arms as though sheltering, safeguarding. Wind gusts and breezes swirled. After about twenty minutes I awoke looked around, yawned, stared in a reverie, rubbed my eyes. This went on for about five minutes, until I started to become aware of my aloneness in that car, until my isolation among the faint sounds of the suburban streets and the murky noiselessness within the interior of the car seeped into my understanding, and until the hunger in my stomach made me hunger more, intensifying. I started to whine, appealing, wondering where exactly I was and where Mommy Sophia was. I wanted relief. I spotted my pacifier which had fallen to the car seat, but I couldn’t reach it.